Will we ever learn the true level of corruption?

I can’t remember a time when a number of major global sports appear collectively in disarray. Will cycling ever manage to lift the cloud of Lance Armstrong?

The multiple Tour De France winner, soon to be the subject of a feature film, was after his brave fight with cancer a poster boy for people all over the world until his cheating was exposed.

But whilst he was rightly stripped of titles, it’s the related almost unseen damage that can never be repaired.

He won the Tour on 7 consecutive occasions from 1999 to 2005, and whilst no doubt a number of other riders were at it as well, how much income through endorsements and sponsorship have the highest finishing clean riders in the 7 respective years missed out on?

It’s probably effectively life changing money, and can never really be calculated but I’m sure the clean riders know who they are, and no one could really blame them for being bitter about the whole thing. The same can almost said for Athletics, another sport currently under the microscope and embroiled in a scandal.

Russia, and before it the entire Eastern Block, have been allegedly cheating for years in a number of sports through performance enhancing drugs, British swimmer Sharron Davies was robbed of Gold at the Moscow 35 years ago, a wrong partly righted retrospectively years later but like the clean cyclists is it almost a case of too much, too little, too late?

Lord Coe as head of World Athletics now has a gargantuan task to return his beloved sport to some of credibility, made all the more difficult with the fact that with it no longer being the Corinthian sport of yesteryear there’s so much money on offer the drug cheats will try to continue to use technology to stay one step ahead of detection.

Which brings us on to football, and the circus that is FIFA. With what appears to be an almost weekly revelation many ask can footballs governing body sort itself out? At first I thought it was a joke when I read that it had been suggested that the United Nations former head Kofi Annan had been approached to sort out world football, but when I googled it, it wasn’t a hoax he actually had, and he’d turned it down!

Will we ever learn the true level of the corruption within football? And has the time come to effectively disband FIFA and start again?

Without wishing to sound xenophobic or like the archetypal ‘Little Englander’, but I would like to see Russia and Qatar stripped of hosting the next two World Cups and then reallocate the tournaments to countries who have the ability to host them, and yes in my opinion one of those countries is England.

And finally it’s time for another international weekend so with no Albion game it’s the chance for Worthing based Amex regulars to take in a game at Woodside Road.

3rd placed Rebels take on East Grinstead in another Ryman South Sussex Derby, for those who have made it down to Woodside this season they will know that entertainment is almost a given, for those who’ve yet to watch a game on the new state of the art surface, where have you been?

It’s nearly Christmas! Kick off is 3pm and all Albion season ticket holders get in for a fiver on production of the said ticket.